This new gadget makes wireless home audio affordable

For quite some time, music junkies have been on the lookout for a convenient household music streaming solution. Rocki, a successfully funded Kickstarter project designed to wirelessly connect your stereo to your smartphone, may not be exactly that solution yet — but it's a pretty good start.

Rocki is a small, colorful Wi-Fi receiver that hooks into any standard 3.5mm jack. It's smaller than a deck of cards, but for something that will likely wind up hidden behind your stereo equipment, it's very stylish. The angular, palm-size device is available in such punny colors as "Paint it BLACK," and "Clockwork ORANGE."

You've probably heard of Sonos (currently the market leader in connected home audio), a service that grants users the ability to control the entirety of their home audio from a phone or iPod Touch. Want to listen to Jimmy Buffett in the pool without interrupting the NPR your dog needs to fall asleep? Easy peasy with the Sonos app.

Yet Sonos equipment, like most high-end audio gear, gets very pricey, very quickly. Regardless of the setup, you're looking at spending several hundred — if not thousand — dollars to control all the audio devices in your home.

Rocki fills the same role as Sonos' Connect module, letting you send audio to your existing stereo equipment over your wireless network — but at $50 per unit it does so for one-seventh the price. That's quite a bargain if all you want to do is stream music to the equipment you've already got.

The problem is that, as a start-up, Rocki's got some obstacles to overcome if it wants to take on established competitors. Questions about production, quality control and even app development are legitimate concerns. This becomes obvious as soon as you hook up Rocki; some streaming services like Google Play Music don't have an official API yet, so Rocki has no way to talk to those services.

Unfortunately, setting up Rocki is a bit of a pain in the neck. Because Rocki operates over Wi-Fi (and not directly to your phone via Bluetooth) it has to connect to your wireless router. If you've ever owned a router, ever, you're probably aware that routers just don't play nice with anything — and if your router isn't set up just so, it won't play nice with Rocki, either.

Leaving aside some of its technical difficulties, the Rocki is actually a cool concept once you've got it running. But here, too, the device shows its immaturity and shortcomings. Though there was a lot of bluster about streaming services signing on to support this device, so far only SoundCloud, Rhapsody and Last.fm have default options in the app. Google Play Music, Amazon's new Prime streaming, Pandora and even Spotify are all missing — a massive letdown for content subscribers.

For those of you keeping score at home, this means you'll likely only be streaming music that you have stored locally on your phone. Though Sonos has support for most streaming services, Rocki does not, and that makes the plucky little device a non-starter for most people.

At the end of the day, Rocki provides enough value to justify its $50 price tag. While it doesn't quite live up to its full potential just yet, its problems are generally fixable. The app can always get an update, Google could always share the Play Music API, and Spotify and Pandora are surely on the company's shortlist for future support.

Rocki has all the muscle in place to be a contender when it comes to the music streaming market — it just needs a little more work.